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In this landmark work, the seven great writers of the American Renaissance—Emerson, Thoreau, Writman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson—are examined together in their cultural contexts. David Reynolds reveals how these authors broadly assimilated the themes and images of popular culture. Their classic works—among them Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Leaves of Grass, Walden, and the tales of Poe—are given strikingly original reading when viewed against the rich, often startling background of long neglected popular writings of the time.
Reynolds also explores a whole lost world of sensational literature, including grisly novels, openly sold on the street, that combined intense violence with explicit eroticism. He demonstrates as well how common concerns with issues of religion, slavery, and workers' (as well as women's) rights resonate in the major writings.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Open Text:
American Writers and Their Environment
Part One: God's Bow, Man's Arrows:
Religion, Reform, and American Literature
1. The New Religious Style
2. The Reform Impulse and the Paradox of Immoral Didacticism
3. The Transcendentalists, Whitman, and Popular Reform
4. Hawthorne and the Reform Impulse
5. Melville's Whited Sepulchres
Part Two: Public Poison:
Sensationalism and Sexuality
6. The Sensational Press and the Rise of Subversive Literature
7. The Erotic Imagination
8. Poe and Popular Irrationalism
9. Hawthorne's Cultural Demons
10. Melville's Ruthless Democracy
11. Whitman's Transfigured Sensationalism
Part Three: Other Amazons:
Women's Rights, Women's Wrongs, and the Literary Imagination
12. Types of American Womanhood
13. Hawthorne's Heroines
14. The American Women's Renaissance and Emily Dickinson
Part Four: The Grotesque Posture:
Popular Humor and the American Subversive Style
15. The Carnivalization of American Language
16. Transcendental Wild Oats
17. Whitman's Poetic Humor
18. Stylized Laughter in Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville
Epilogue
Reconstructive Criticism: Literary Theory and Literary History
Notes
Index
Overview
In this landmark work, the seven great writers of the American Renaissance—Emerson, Thoreau, Writman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson—are examined together in their cultural contexts. David Reynolds reveals how these authors broadly assimilated the themes and images of popular culture. Their classic works—among them Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Leaves of Grass, Walden, and the tales of Poe—are given strikingly original reading when viewed against the rich, often startling background of long neglected ...